Harvest

by Georgina Harding

  He was talking about the Mau Mau, wasn’t he? Richard said on the way home. Richard had watched the news on television.

  Jonny asked, What’s maumau?

  You wouldn’t understand. It’s politics. In Kenya, where that man came from, where he’s ruling the blacks.

  But what is it? You haven’t said what it means.

  It’s the terrible things you see, that you never forget. Richard wouldn’t tell him more. He would keep his advantage over his little brother.

  Oh, Jonny said. I know what maumau is.

  

  The winter wheat ripened. There had been rain in the spring, heavy showers in May and June, and after the rain the sun came out. The crop had grown thick and tall. This last crop would be the best Charlie had ever planted.

  It was to be a fine harvest.

  A fine summer.

  Fine days broke, morning after morning – and she woke early those mornings, she woke early and watched the light grow and did not go back to sleep – the blue sky bright and empty, as if there was some hollowness there that set off an echo until there was such activity about her that it could no longer be heard.

  That man invited us to Africa. Can we go?

  Ah, you mean Mr Hussey. Did Mr Hussey tell you things?

  No. He talked to Jonny though, about the things that Daddy did in the jungle.

  Did he?

  Or maybe Jonny made it up. Jonny’s silly, isn’t he?

  Well, he’s younger than you are. You have to let him have his stories.

  So, can we go?

  Who needs to go to Africa? It’s so hot and sunny here.

  Let them not go to Africa. Let them not know such things.

  When the combine came out into the field in front of the house, she drew the curtains. She heard her mother’s voice from the past, her house-proud mother telling her when she had first come to live here that the sun came too brightly into the south-facing room, that she must draw the curtains in the daytime lest the light fade the pictures and damage the furnishings. There weren’t watercolours in the room any more, she had moved the watercolours long ago and put up other pictures instead, and had the chairs re-covered, but she kept the room dim nonetheless like the urban girl she had once been, her mother’s daughter who, when she came to the house, so anxious to do things right, had once worried about things like the light bleaching the upholstery. The curtains only muffled the sound a little – for how could she keep the windows closed on a hot July day? She sat in the room with the windows open and the curtains blowing, motes of dust dancing in the light that entered between the moving curtains, and heard other men and machines gather this crop that Charlie had planted. She had to let the boys go out to watch. She couldn’t keep them in. The men had said they would be good to them. She had to trust these other men, but she would not see them. Come out with us, Mum, the boys said, but she wouldn’t. No, I’ve seen it before, lots of times, you remember how we’ve seen it before. When they came back at the end of the day hot and dusty and exhilarated she had made them a cake for tea. But they saw that she was sad. Jonny saw, at least. It’s all right, Mummy, I won’t go tomorrow, he said, I’ll stay with you, and she said, Well then let’s take a trip to the seaside, so long as this weather lasts, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? Only Richard wanted to be with the men. They went out in the morning before the work had begun, with blankets and a picnic, and a striped windbreak because even in July the wind off the North Sea could be cold. Richard sulked all the way as they drove. When they got there he threw stones and kicked the sand into the waves, and when they swam he dared Jonny out of his depth and ducked him until he ran away up the beach crying. They came home late in the afternoon. The combine was still going, moved on to the next field. Inland the air had kept hot and dry, and the combine would keep going well into the dusk. All right, Richard, you can run out now, if the men will have you. But do ask the men first, won’t you? She saw him go and felt that she had lost him. He was boy, all boy, running out in his red shorts to the roar of the machines and the cloud where the combine worked. She picked up the jumper that he had left on the kitchen chair and ran after him a little way – Take this with you, it’ll get cold later – but he was too fast for her and she came back in. That boy-ness in him she could not touch.

  One weekend late that same summer, she invited a male friend to stay. There had been other friends to stay, women and couples, but never before a single man. It was August, lovely weather, the harvest almost done, the dust of it still in the air. Michael was an old flame. He had even proposed to her once, before she met Charlie, and perhaps he might one day have proposed to her again. She might just possibly have come to marry him – later, not then, then would have been far too soon, only sometime much later. But none of that was in her mind at the time, only that he was a good, kind, sympathetic man, and he tried hard with the boys. He drove up on the Saturday in a convertible Sunbeam and squeezed them all in and took them out for a ride, parked it outside the front door when they came back and let the boys play in it till teatime when he put up the roof. And he had brought them presents, well chosen considering he was a bachelor, Airfix models and the latest Beano. Perhaps he tried too hard. The visit was a disaster.

  The Sunday was hot and beautiful. They had lunch outside where the French windows from the sitting room opened onto the lawn. Michael had brought wine from London, in a green Italian bottle wrapped with raffia. It was a treat. One didn’t drink wine much in those days. The two of them sat on after lunch and drank the last of the wine while the boys went off to play. They could hear the sound of a combine in the distance, on Jackson’s land, not theirs, on the fields closest to the village – or she heard it, perhaps Michael had not been aware of it at all. If she had married Michael then she would have sold the farm and they would have gone to live in London, she supposed, or Tunbridge Wells, some place close to London from which he could have commuted to the City, and it would have been some quite other life, and she and the boys would have left all this behind. She liked the wine, and Michael’s conversation was easy. She told him of her plans for the garden. If she had married him she would have needed a garden. So it should have been Tunbridge Wells. She told him how bare it was when she first arrived, Uncle Ralph’s hybrid teas had grown out of hand, Virginia creeper swallowing the back of the house – though there were touches that were beautiful, like the lilacs Ralph had planted, the mass of daffodils long established beneath the sycamores that made the place so glorious in the spring. She told him how she had drawn plans and planted the hedges, separating her garden from the land about, and planted the roses within it. You’ve worked wonders, he said, and they got up from the table and walked around and she told him what else she planned to plant, suddenly immersed in the moment as she so rarely was in those days. Oh, but I’m getting carried away, you don’t have a garden, do you, you can’t be interested in all of this! Michael said, But of course I am, and smiled, his eyes to hers, and she realised how close they were standing and in that instant turned away. Too soon, it was far too soon. Was it love or sympathy or loneliness that hung between them, the thread that she felt between her hand and his, so close to her even as she turned? Now where can the boys have got to? she said then. She would hide behind the boys. That had become her refuge when people began to touch her: being their mother, no more, making that a barrier between herself and the rest of the world. They were here just a moment ago, she said. They were climbing the walnut tree. There was a rope hanging from the tree that they used to climb to the first branch, where they could spy on the garden unseen behind the leaves.

  I saw them run off, Michael said.

  When?

  Now. Only just now.

  Oh. Oh well, they’ll come back soon enough.

  Do you think we should look for them?

  No. I’m sure they’ll be back before you leave.

  The conversation had died. She didn’t know what to speak of any more. They walked to the front of the house.
Perhaps the boys were playing in his car again, but they weren’t. They went inside and Michael fetched down his case, and still the boys were nowhere to be seen. She must find them to say goodbye.

  It’s all right, you can say goodbye for me.

  She called their names, up the stairs. Surely they could not be indoors, upstairs on a day like this?

  Really, it’s fine, there’s no need to find them for me. Only I must get going. It’s a long drive.

  They said goodbye, just the two of them, with a look but no kiss. And he started the car, and waited a moment. She thought that the sound of the engine might have drawn the boys, but she stood alone and watched as he drove away.

  She found them in the greenhouse.

  Had there been an earthquake? It looked as if there had been an earthquake.

  Terracotta rubble, soil, leaves beneath their feet as if a miniature terracotta city had been destroyed. The two boys giants in the ruins.

  Jonny saw her first and stood transfixed, terrified, but Richard held a hoe in his two hands and went on smashing things. The pots in which tomatoes grew, the plants torn out and thrown down and the thick scent of their crushed leaves in the air, ripening fruits squashed green and red underfoot. Other pots swept down from the shelves, ten-inch pots, eight-inch pots, four-inch pots, the towers of tiny pots in which she grew seedlings, thrown down and smashed, one after another, among the sieves and seed trays. She couldn’t speak. At last Richard saw her and held still, but shaking, the tool he held trembling in the air, as if arrested but not halted in his movement, hair blond, eyes blue, rooted in the chaos like a sturdy wild Vandal warrior. Everything about them seemed to hold utterly still as she took a step forward onto the debris. She felt shards crack further beneath her feet. Heard them break. As if there was a whole ruined city, a civilisation, the work of ages beneath her feet.

  How could they do this?

  Another step, and she saw Richard’s eyes dart to the glass above their heads. Would he have raised the hoe and smashed that too? With one final blow? The sky glittering down on them, glass breaking, falling, cutting boys’ skin? Glass in their eyes. No, tears. Tears in all of their eyes.

  He’s gone, she said. Now come in and have tea.

  They left the ruins without a word.

  They need a father figure, her friends had said.

  But they had their figure.

  There was a figure, a shadow, a voice that echoed through the spaces of the house. That caught the imaginary cricket balls they threw, or batted them back. Or missed.

  Howzat?

  That September the boys went away to school. That was what people did, in those days. It made so much sense, people said, for the two of them to go, and together. It’ll be good for them, people said, they’ll be just like all the other boys when they’re there. People always had things to say. People tried to press you into the normal. To imitate the normal even if that wasn’t what you were. They wanted you to live whatever pattern it was that they themselves lived. If you weren’t a whole family then you had to live always in the lack of it.

  No, it wasn’t correct to say that they went. She sent them. She drove them to the school and left them there.

  The hall of the school was huge. There were other mothers hugging sons goodbye. Some fathers too, but more mothers than fathers. Richard cried. Jonny didn’t. It’s all right, one of the other mothers said, he’ll be running around and playing soon enough, soon as you’re out of sight.

  This she must believe, that her son would have another life once he was out of her sight. Her two sons, everyone, they all had other lives when you did not see them. Like their father had done. Some other life, out of sight.

  She drove away from the school, the tall brick building with all its windows and chimneys, away down the drive and along the road, and turned off the road into a lay-by and herself cried. It was some time before she was ready for the drive home. She took a handkerchief from her handbag and dried her face. She turned the rear-view mirror so that she could see herself, tidied her make-up and put on lipstick, though there would be no one but herself to see her, tightened her lips one against the other, sighed, and drove on. It was late afternoon. The school would be feeding them tea. She imagined the mass of boys, her boys in the mass, their shorts, their long socks striped at the tops, their bare knees, their tousled hair. Somehow she could not see their faces. She drove the twenty miles home. Driving was slow in those days though there was scarcely any traffic on the road. It was almost dusk by the time she got home. A pity, she thought, because she might have done some gardening. As it was, she got home and unlocked the door, and let Jess out, Jess impatient to be out, and she walked the garden watching the dog, still holding the key that she had not thought to put down, and in the nice shoes that she had worn to go to the school though the ground was wet.

  One noticed as it got dark how the yellows stood out. The yellow flowers held their colour as other colours dulled, the yellow flowers and the first yellow leaves. She always remarked on that, how in autumn as the sun grew low some colours seemed to hold its light, the last of the goldenrod and the rudbeckia and then some asters that were just coming out, a particular variety of aster that had pale mauve petals and a yellow centre that shone out in the dusk. Something to do with the spectrum, Charlie had once told her, and whatever type of ray of sunlight it was that bent over the curve of the horizon, some piece of science which she had never quite bothered to understand. What need to understand what was there before one’s eyes? She walked until the last hint of colour was lost. The dog was back at the door before her.

  She woke in an empty house. Did the chores of the morning downstairs, not going back up. She would have Mrs T clean the boys’ room when she came on Tuesday. She would leave it till then. Until then she could not bear to enter it.

  It was as if they were out with Charlie. He had come and taken them away. Hey, boys, do you want to come out with me, shoot some rabbits, there were a hundred rabbits on the Five Acre today, we need to scare them off, but come quickly while I’ve got time – no, don’t tell your mother, she’ll fuss over your coats, it’s not cold, come as you are – and they’d gone out, the three of them with Jess. But Jess was home in the kitchen, on the rug in front of the Aga. Jess hadn’t gone. They weren’t out there on the Five Acre, the tall man and the two boys, the man and the older of the boys carrying guns and the younger one the lead to the golden dog (but only to give him something to do, because the dog was well trained and needed no lead at a time like that), and the bunnies scattering away from them. And if they hadn’t been there, then they wouldn’t be in the spinney either. Jess raised her head. Come on, Jess, let’s go for a walk. The dog rose, and she put on her boots and this time it was she who took up the lead, not attaching it, only putting it into her pocket, just in case, since she was walking blind, did not know where they were going and whether or not they would chance to meet livestock or find themselves walking along a road where the lead would be needed, and went out. The sky was a deep blue September sky but smudged low across the landscape here and there where men were burning stubble. There was barely a wind, only the highest leaves of the trees faintly moving and a tinge of burning in the air. It felt as still outdoors as it had been in the house, where only she had moved and the dog, but in the distance she could see that the men were taking advantage of the stillness to get the burning done, setting thick bands of smoke flowing across the fields. When she got to the Five Acre it was already burnt, the ground satin black. No pickings left for the birds. Jackson must have burnt it just the day before. Always quick on the job, old Jackson, Charlie used to say. Doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet – or the stubble lie. Jackson had been quick to take up a contract on the land. Charlie would have expected that, would have expected him to take over the farm and would probably have thought him the best man for the job. He’s a bit of a hard man, but a good farmer, Jackson, Charlie would say, looking over at his neighbour’s fields. Why was it that Charl
ie’s voice kept coming back to her now, ringing in her ears? Well it was gone now, the last of the last crop that he had planted. She felt hard as Jackson. Tougher now that it was burnt and gone.

  Flakes of black straw hung in the hedges. Her walking stirred the ground so that she had the taste of ash on her lips. The spinney was up ahead. No, not that way, Jess, not today. We’ll go back the way we came.

  She went back and worked all of the rest of the day in the garden. That day, and the ones that followed. Never did she work so hard in the garden as in that time after the boys went away to school. It was early for lifting and dividing and replanting, but if she did it with care the plants would not mind. Besides, it was so much easier to imagine how they would look in their new positions, next year, how the border might be rearranged, when the plants still had their leaves to them and a touch of colour, and one could see the form of the clumps. So much of gardening was that, the labour carrying one outside of the present moment and into the future, imagining how the garden would be, next year, another year, any year but this one.

  She felt a shadow above her as if someone was standing there. Charlie darling, she said without looking up, yet she knew even as she spoke, but only a piece of her knew, that the shadow was not made by Charlie there but only a branch of the crabapple which she had moved beneath as she forked up weeds. So much she used to talk to Charlie about her plans for the garden.